Data privacy: Facebook or IoT?

Facebook is under criticism as a political consulting firm was able to harvest raw data from 50 million profiles. This raises once again critical questions regarding data privacy: to whom the data belongs and who is responsible to protect it?

In the Facebook scandal case, usage of collected data is a core concern and its exploitation for a political campaign is unacceptable.When it comes to data privacy in the IoT ecosystem, the immediate reaction is that there is nothing comparable with the type of data Facebook manages. Why should we worry about a temperature figure that is sent every hour to the Cloud? In fact, we should….

The added value for IoT data may not come from the data itself, but from the intelligence created by its accumulation. If each individual piece of data is not protected enough, it becomes an easy path to access analytics, leading to data monetization or misusage. Furthermore, how can we trust data analytics and monetize it if we do not have trust in the original data itself?In fact, the difference between data harvesting in Facebook and IoT is that IoT will impact not millions, but billions of devices that will be left unattended for years. IoT large scale deployment will also be a matter of trust: trust in the technologies, trust in the ecosystem…. and trust in the data